The current and five past presidents of the IEEE Reliability Society. From left to right: Bill Tonti, Dennis Hoffman, Christian Hansen, Jeff Voas, Sam Keene and Tom Fagan.

On behalf of the IEEE Reliability Society, welcome to PHM 2019 and welcome to San Francisco, a premiere tourist attraction. Please look forward to an exciting conference and the oppportunity to attend many ground-breaking presentations of the latest applications, research and development in the PHM discipline. I hope that you will have a chance to make some new professional contacts, so you can leverage what you learn to your job, thus benefiting yourself and your company or university.

The IEEE is the world's largest professional organization with over 425,000 members in 160 countries. The Reliability Society (RS) is one of 45 technical societies and councils within the IEEE focused on the broad aspects of reliability engineering, also commonly known as the specialty engineering discliplines. RS has the management, resources, and administrative and technical structures to develop and to provide technical information via publications, training, conferences, and technical library (IEEE Xplorer) data to its RS members and the Specialty Engineering community. You can learn more by visiting the Reliability Society web site (rs.ieee.org) as it is the gateway to the many resources that the RS makes available to its members and others interested in the broad aspects of reliability.

The Reliability Society is committed to advancing the state-of-the-art of the Specialty Engineering disciplines as demonstrated by is sponsorship of this and many other conferences. PHM goes hand-in-hand with Reliability as PHM can directly improve effective reliability, availability, mission reliability, system safety, and maintenance by being able to provide on-condition health, prognose pending failure, and predict future health status.

If you are not already a member, please consider joining the Reliability Society to help create a win-win situation for you and the Reliability Society in this current dynamic, world-wide technology environment. By joining the Reliability Society and participating actively, you, as an individual, receive access to the Societyâ€™s many resources plus the opportunities to interact with many of the "movers and shakers" in this broad reliability discipline. Joining and actively participating are great opportunities for professional growth!